On going blind for my art

On September 29, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing2 Comments

So Skylights may, or may not, actually be available at this exact second on at least two major online retailers. However, I’m going to be faintly ridiculous and ask anyone who was planning on buying it right away (hundreds of you, surely) to hold off until tomorrow– I’m in the “upload, download, look, find one more thing wrong, resubmit” phase of the damn book at the moment. It will be perfectly clean by tomorrow morning and I think the latest version I’ve uploaded actually does qualify as up to my standards– but I can’t be sure until it publishes and I update the version on my Kindle.

I will post links early tomorrow morning to everything that’s live; I’m expecting Amazon and Smashwords, with the Smashwords-affiliated sites showing up once Smashwords completes its ridiculous vetting process. I’ll link up to those as they appear.

(And, once those links do show up, I will love you forever if you share the hell out of them. But not quite yet.)

It’s interesting, this story. I love the hell out of it, but I’m not sure it’s going to get the uniformly positive reaction that Benevolence Archives did. I think reviews are going to be a little bit more mixed. I’m really looking forward to seeing what people think about it.

But not until tomorrow. 🙂

Another early look at the SKYLIGHTS cover

On August 19, 2014August 19, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing3 Comments

As always, the caveat that this is preliminary as hell and is basically just a color test– my artist and I exchanged half-a-dozen emails last night about various aspects of this, including one thing I griped about (the sky’s too pink.) But I’m still too excited not to share it.

Basically at this point there are helmets and logo work to do (I approved a helmet design yesterday) and then refining the colors until gorgeousness happens. This is what Casey and Jamie’s final work looks like so I have no doubt that the final colors on this will be spectacular.

I’m going to restrain myself from posting any further updates until you get the final image. Hopefully in a couple of weeks; finalizing the colors will take a bit.

I note, with some delight…

On August 11, 2014August 11, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, Writing5 Comments

…that Skylights has a page on Goodreads now.

It’s real! Er!

(In other news, this was my 750th post.)

OH MAN GUYS: preliminary SKYLIGHTS cover art!

On August 6, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing2 Comments

I’ve been sitting on this for a while, but we’ve had a few back-and-forth meetings and a few sample drafts and I finally talked Casey into giving me permission to give you an advanced look at the Skylights cover!

(This is, obviously, a work in progress. But it is still awesome.)

Part of his process is to get the pose right first and then to go back and do clothing and all that, which is why the characters are not dressed despite being on the surface of Mars. The first round was three entirely different concept sketches, and then this round was the sketch I picked with three different positions for the two characters. This is the one we’re going with. I knew it was the one I wanted immediately; it was his favorite too, which entertains me.

His next step is going to be to flesh out the background (which is still in “first draft” mode) and then to fill out the characters. I covered this in notes and gave it back to him today, and we spent about half an hour going over details.

I am so excited about this cover.

The book should be out in September, I’m thinking. Later than I initially wanted, but it’s gonna look great.